the merger of what had been Alberta Government Telephones (established in 1908) and BC Tel (established by special act of parliament in 1916). Telus can trace its history to the introduction of the telephone in Western Canada.

One of the dangers of using American “”experts”” such as that cited by your writer is the lack of understanding of the Canadian market. In this case, Yankee Group seems to have been fooled by new names. While Telus has expanded as a CLEC into Eastern Canada, this is no different than Bell’s expansion into the West through Bell West.

It might have been an interesting story to understand why an incumbent carrier like Telus has been able to transform their systems when an incumbent like Bell has needed more time.

You neglected to mention that their choice of MediaPlayer9 means all users of the system will be forced to install Microsoft DRM and thereafter lose the rights to decide what their own computer can and cannot play.

Too bad the U.K. CEO thought of the right thing for the wrong reason. Banning e-mail within an office is a great idea. Maybe people would actually learn to communicate– what a radical concept, eh?

E-mail is just about as good as voice mail for being able to ignore anything and still look like you are busy. Many times I have seen someone e-mail a work mate less than five feet away and then say, but didn’t you get my e-mail last Tuesday?

I find this initiative very interesting but I think it is missing a few points and I would be interested in finding out what they consider “”Northern Canada.”” The reason I ask is because my wife and I moved from Toronto to the country about four years ago and one of the interesting problems I had when we moved was trying to find high-speed Internet access.

We are located in a wooded area in the King City, Ont., region but we are only 10-20 minutes away from King City, Aurora and Newmarket. My Bell telephone line at that time could only provide me with abut 1,200 bps dial-up speed and I had to fight tooth and nail to get Bell to address the problem. I can now get a dial-up speed of 28,000 bps.

I am too far for ADSL, SDLC or Bell Sympatico.

The only service I was able to find at that time was from Look TV, which was a direct line microwave broadband solution. It is OK when it works but a pain when it does not work.

The connection provides cable download speeds of about 300K while upload speeds are only dial-up speed.

I would be very interested in being part of this Northern Canada Internet initiative. I think there is a whole group of rural users that live in areas like Orangeville where they also do not have access to high speed Internet.

I believe that the replies to Shane’s open letter demonstrate the type of problem people are concerned about. No matter how good an article a journalist writes, there will still be some readers who will misinterpret things.

Anthony R. Sukdeo said that, “”There are those who own intellectual property and have worked hard for it, and those who do not own any such thing and might not understand the difficulty of trying to protect them.”” He seemed to be suggesting that it was The SCO Group that was the copyright holder that worked hard and needs protection, when the opposite is true.

The Linux kernel, like most such Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects, is an open collaborative collection of the works of many hundreds of software copyright holders. While the question of whether or not SCO is one of those copyright holders and whether they authorized any contribution is in dispute in the courts; the copyright of the many hundreds of other legitimate contributors is not in dispute. Having a single contributor trying to extract license fees, in violation of the license agreement that those many hundreds of copyright holders offered their work, is far greater an infringement of rights than even the most optimistic imaginings of SCO’s lawyers.

I also found Robert Gagnon’s suggestion that this is a “”religious war”” to be interesting. He may not realize that it is not Linux itself that is the innovation, but Free/Libre and Open Source Software methodologies and business models. Nobody suggested that the electric light bulb replacing candles was a “”religious war””. Nobody suggested that the Internet replacing most of the private vendor-dependent networks was a “”religious war””. Most people consider these innovative changes to simply be progress.

Read your article on the spectrum auctions. There is more to this than meets the eye. One big issue we have with these auctions is that the big carriers purchase the spectrum and do not use it. One of their motives is to make sure that smaller players do not get a foothold and compete against them. You need to ask some questions as to what happened to the spectrum in the last go-round! Great revenue source for Industry Canada, but not such a good deal for the public in the long run. There has been an explosive growth in wireless broadband products and services using unlicensed spectrum (the ISM band), but there is almost no equipment even available for the band that has been auctioned off.

Michael JarmanTime Mobile Communications Inc.

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